NUTRITION PRIZE [ZIMBABWE, TANZANIA, UK] —
James Cole, for calculating that the caloric intake from a human-cannibalism diet is significantly lower than the caloric intake from most other traditional meat diets.

OBSTETRICS PRIZE — [SPAIN] —
Marisa López-Teijón, Álex García-Faura, Alberto Prats-Galino, and Luis Pallarés Aniorte, for showing that a developing human fetus responds more strongly to music that is played electromechanically inside the mother's vagina than to music that is played electromechanically on the mother's belly.

BIOLOGY PRIZE [UK] — Awarded jointly to: Charles Foster,
for living in the wild as, at different times, a badger, an otter, a deer, a fox, and a bird; and to
Thomas Thwaites, for creating prosthetic extensions of his
limbs that allowed him to move in the manner of, and spend time roaming hills in the company of, goats.

WHO ATTENDED THE CEREMONY: Charles Foster, Thomas Thwaites. [NOTE: Thomas Thwaites's goat suit was kindly released for Ig Nobel purposes
from the exhibition 'Platform - Body/Space' at Het Nieuwe Instituut in Rotterdam, and will be back on display at the museum from 4 October
2016 till 8 January 2017.]

LITERATURE PRIZE [SWEDEN] — Fredrik
Sjöberg, for his three-volume autobiographical work about the pleasures of collecting flies that are dead, and flies that are not yet dead.

REFERENCE: The Fly Trap is the first volume of Fredrik Sjöberg's autobiographical trilogy, En flugsamlares väg
("The Path of a Fly Collector"), and the first to be published in English. Pantheon Books, 2015, ISBN 978-1101870150.

WHO ATTENDED THE CEREMONY: Fredrik Sjöberg

PERCEPTION PRIZE [JAPAN] — Atsuki Higashiyama
and Kohei Adachi, for investigating whether things look different when you bend over and view them between your legs.

WHO ATTENDED THE CEREMONY: The authors were unable to attend the ceremony; they sent a video acceptance speech. They received
their prize at a special event (The European Ig Nobel Show) in Amsterdam, The Netherlands on October 3.

MANAGEMENT PRIZE — Gennaro Bernile
[ITALY, SINGAPORE, USA], Vineet Bhagwat [USA, INDIA],
and P. Raghavendra Rau [UK, INDIA, FRANCE, LUXEMBOURG, GERMANY, JAPAN], for discovering that many business leaders developed during childhood a fondness for risk-taking, when they experienced natural disasters (such as earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, tsunamis, and wildfires) that — for them — had no dire personal consequences.

WHO ATTENDED THE CEREMONY: Jaroslava Durdiaková and Peter Celec will be at the ceremony. Hajime Kimata will be at the Ig Informal Lectures, on Saturday, Sept 19 (a prior commmitment prevented him from attending the Thursday ceremony); he sent a video acceptence speech which was played at the Thursday night ceremony.

MATHEMATICS PRIZE — Elisabeth Oberzaucher [AUSTRIA, GERMANY, UK] and Karl Grammer [AUSTRIA, GERMANY], for trying to use mathematical techniques to determine whether and how Moulay Ismael the Bloodthirsty, the Sharifian Emperor of Morocco, managed, during the years from 1697 through 1727, to father 888 children.

BIOLOGY PRIZE — Bruno Grossi,
Omar Larach, Mauricio Canals, Rodrigo A. Vásquez [CHILE],
José Iriarte-Díaz [CHILE, USA], for observing that when you attach a
weighted stick to the rear end of a chicken, the chicken then walks in a manner similar to that in which dinosaurs are thought to have walked.

PHYSIOLOGY and ENTOMOLOGY PRIZE — Awarded jointly to two individuals:
Justin Schmidt [USA, CANADA],
for painstakingly creating the Schmidt Sting Pain Index, which rates the relative pain people feel when stung by various insects;
and to Michael L. Smith [PANAMA, US, UK, THE NETHERLANDS],
for carefully arranging for honey bees to sting him repeatedly on 25 different locations on his body, to learn which locations are
the least painful (the skull, middle toe tip, and upper arm). and which are the most painful (the nostril, upper lip, and penis shaft).

The 2014 Ig Nobel Prize Winners

PHYSICS PRIZE [JAPAN]: Kiyoshi Mabuchi, Kensei Tanaka, Daichi Uchijima and Rina Sakai, for measuring the amount of friction
between a shoe and a banana skin, and between a banana skin and the floor, when a person steps on a banana skin that's on the floor.

NEUROSCIENCE PRIZE [CHINA, CANADA]: Jiangang Liu, Jun Li, Lu Feng, Ling Li, Jie Tian, and Kang Lee, for trying to understand what happens in the brains of people who see the face of Jesus in a piece of toast.

PSYCHOLOGY PRIZE [UK, FINLAND, AUSTRALIA, USA]: Peter K. Jonason,
Amy Jones, and Minna Lyons, for amassing evidence
that people who habitually stay up late are, on average, more self-admiring, more manipulative, and more psychopathic than people
who habitually arise early in the morning.

PUBLIC HEALTH PRIZE [CZECH REPUBLIC, JAPAN, USA, INDIA]:
Jaroslav Flegr,
Jan Havlíček and Jitka Hanušova-Lindova, and to David Hanauer, Naren Ramakrishnan,
Lisa Seyfried, for investigating whether it is mentally hazardous for a human being to own a cat.

ART PRIZE [ITALY]: Marina de Tommaso,
Michele Sardaro, and Paolo Livrea, for measuring the relative pain people suffer while looking at an ugly painting, rather
than a pretty painting, while being shot [in the hand] by a powerful laser beam.

ECONOMICS PRIZE [ITALY]: ISTAT — the Italian government's National
Institute of Statistics, for proudly taking the lead in fulfilling the European Union mandate for each country to increase the
official size of its national economy by including revenues from prostitution, illegal drug sales, smuggling, and all other
unlawful financial transactions between willing participants.

SAFETY ENGINEERING PRIZE: The late Gustano Pizzo [USA], for inventing an electro-mechanical system to trap airplane hijackers
— the system drops a hijacker through trap doors, seals him into a package, then drops the encapsulated hijacker through the
airplane's specially-installed bomb bay doors, whence he parachutes to earth, where police, having been alerted by radio, await
his arrival. US Patent #3811643, Gustano A. Pizzo, "anti hijacking system for aircraft", May 21, 1972.

ARCHAEOLOGY PRIZE: Brian Crandall [USA] and
Peter Stahl [CANADA, USA], for parboiling a dead shrew,
and then swallowing the shrew without chewing, and then carefully examining everything excreted during subsequent days — all so they
could see which bones would dissolve inside the human digestive system, and which bones would not.

PROBABILITY PRIZE: Bert Tolkamp [UK, the
NETHERLANDS], Marie Haskell [UK], Fritha Langford [UK, CANADA], David Roberts [UK], and Colin Morgan [UK], for making two related discoveries: First, that the longer a cow has been lying down, the more likely that cow will soon stand up; and Second, that once a cow stands up, you cannot easily predict how soon that cow will lie down again.

PUBLIC HEALTH PRIZE: Kasian Bhanganada, Tu Chayavatana, Chumporn Pongnumkul, Anunt Tonmukayakul, Piyasakol
Sakolsatayadorn, Krit Komaratal, and Henry Wilde, for the medical techniques described in their report "Surgical Management
of an Epidemic of Penile Amputations in Siam" — techniques which they recommend, except in cases where the amputated
penis had been partially eaten by a duck. [THAILAND]

ACOUSTICS PRIZE: Kazutaka Kurihara and
Koji Tsukada [JAPAN] for creating the SpeechJammer — a machine that disrupts a
person's speech, by making them hear their own spoken words at a very slight delay.

LITERATURE PRIZE: The US Government General Accountability Office, for issuing a report about reports about reports that
recommends the preparation of a report about the report about reports about reports.

FLUID DYNAMICS PRIZE: Rouslan
Krechetnikov [USA, RUSSIA, CANADA] and Hans Mayer [USA] for studying the dynamics of liquid-sloshing, to learn what
happens when a person walks while carrying a cup of coffee.

ANATOMY PRIZE: Frans de Waal [The Netherlands
and USA] and Jennifer Pokorny [USA] for discovering
that chimpanzees can identify other chimpanzees individually from seeing photographs of their rear ends.

SPECIAL ANNOUNCEMENT: We are now, in 2012, correcting an error we made in the year 1999, when
we failed to include one winner's name. We now correct that, awarding a share of the 1999 physics prize to Joseph Keller.
Professor Keller is also a co-winner of the 2012 Ig Nobel physics prize, making him a two-time Ig Nobel winner.

The corrected citation is:1999 PHYSICS PRIZE: Len Fisher [UK and Australia] for calculating the optimal way to dunk a
biscuit, and Jean-Marc Vanden-Broeck [UK and Belgium] and Joseph Keller [USA], for calculating how to make a teapot spout
that does not drip.

CHEMISTRY PRIZE: Makoto Imai, Naoki Urushihata, Hideki Tanemura, Yukinobu Tajima, Hideaki Goto, Koichiro Mizoguchi and
Junichi Murakami of JAPAN, for determining the ideal density of airborne wasabi (pungent horseradish) to awaken sleeping people
in case of a fire or other emergency, and for applying this knowledge to invent
the wasabi alarm.

MEDICINE PRIZE: Mirjam Tuk (of THE NETHERLANDS and the UK), Debra
Trampe (of THE NETHERLANDS) and Luk Warlop (of BELGIUM).
and jointly to Matthew Lewis, Peter Snyder and
Robert Feldman (of the USA),
Robert Pietrzak,
David Darby, and
Paul Maruff (of AUSTRALIA) for demonstrating
that people make better decisions about some kinds of things — but worse decisions about other kinds of things‚ when
they have a strong urge to urinate.

LITERATURE PRIZE: John Perry of Stanford University, USA, for his Theory
of Structured Procrastination, which says: To be a high achiever, always work on something important, using it as a way to avoid
doing something that's even more important.

BIOLOGY PRIZE: Darryl Gwynne (of CANADA and AUSTRALIA and the UK and the USA)
and David Rentz (of AUSTRALIA and the USA) for discovering that a certain kind of
beetle mates with a certain kind of Australian beer bottle

MATHEMATICS PRIZE: Dorothy
Martin of the USA (who predicted the world would end in 1954), Pat Robertson of
the USA (who predicted the world would end in 1982), Elizabeth
Clare Prophet of the USA (who predicted the world would end in 1990),
Lee Jang Rim of KOREA (who predicted the
world would end in 1992), Credonia Mwerinde of UGANDA (who
predicted the world would end in 1999),
and Harold Camping of the USA (who
predicted the world would end on September 6,
1994 and later
predicted that the world will end on October 21, 2011), for teaching the world to be careful when making mathematical assumptions and calculations.

PEACE PRIZE: Arturas Zuokas, the mayor of
Vilnius, LITHUANIA, for demonstrating that the
problem of illegally parked luxury cars can be solved by running them over with an armored tank.

PUBLIC SAFETY PRIZE: John Senders of the University of Toronto, CANADA,
for conducting a series of safety experiments
in which a person drives an automobile on a major highway while a visor repeatedly flaps down over his face, blinding him.

MEDICINE PRIZE: Simon Rietveld of the University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands, and
Ilja van Beest of Tilburg University, The
Netherlands, for discovering that symptoms of asthma can be treated with a roller-coaster ride.

WHO ATTENDED THE CEREMONY: Toshiyuki
Nakagaki, Kentaro Ito, Atsushi Tero, Mark Fricker, Dan Bebber [NOTE: THE FOLLOWING ARE CO-WINNERS BOTH THIS YEAR AND IN 2008
when they were awarded an Ig Nobel Prize for demonstrating that slime molds can solve puzzles: Toshiyuki Nakagaki, Ryo Kobayashi,
Atsushi Tero]

PHYSICS PRIZE: Lianne Parkin,
Sheila
Williams, and Patricia Priest
of the University of Otago, New Zealand, for demonstrating that, on icy footpaths in wintertime, people slip and fall less
often if they wear socks on the outside of their shoes.

ECONOMICS PRIZE: The directors, executives, and auditors of four
Icelandic banks — Kaupthing Bank,
Landsbanki, Glitnir Bank, and Central Bank of Iceland — for demonstrating that tiny banks can be rapidly transformed
into huge banks, and vice versa — and for demonstrating that similar things can be done to an entire national economy.

MEDICINE PRIZE: Donald L. Unger, of Thousand Oaks, California, USA, for investigating a possible cause of
arthritis of the fingers, by diligently cracking the knuckles of his left hand — but never cracking the knuckles of his
right hand — every day for more than sixty (60) years.

LITERATURE PRIZE: Ireland's police service (An Garda Siochana), for writing and
presenting more than fifty traffic tickets to the most frequent driving offender in the country —
Prawo Jazdy — whose name
in Polish means "Driving License".

WHO ATTENDED THE CEREMONY: [Karolina Lewestam, a Polish citizen
and holder of a Polish driver's license, speaking on behalf of all her fellow Polish licensed drivers, expressed her good
wishes to the Irish police service.]

MATHEMATICS PRIZE: Gideon Gono, governor of Zimbabwe’s
Reserve Bank, for giving people a simple, everyday way to cope with a wide range of numbers
— from very small to very big — by having his bank print
bank
notes with denominations ranging from one cent ($.01) to one hundred trillion dollars ($100,000,000,000,000).

BIOLOGY PRIZE: Fumiaki Taguchi, Song Guofu, and
Zhang Guanglei of Kitasato University Graduate School of Medical Sciences in Sagamihara, Japan, for demonstrating that kitchen
refuse can be reduced more than 90% in mass by using bacteria extracted from the feces of giant pandas.

ARCHAEOLOGY PRIZE. Astolfo G. Mello Araujo and José Carlos Marcelino of Universidade de São Paulo, Brazil, for measuring how the course of history, or at least the contents of an archaeological dig site, can be scrambled by the actions of a live armadillo.

BIOLOGY PRIZE. Marie-Christine Cadiergues, Christel Joubert, and Michel Franc of Ecole Nationale Veterinaire de Toulouse, France for discovering that the fleas that live on a dog can jump higher than the fleas that live on a cat.

WHO ATTENDED THE CEREMONY: Marie-Christine Cadiergues and Christel Joubert, unable to attend the ceremony, were presented with the prize at a special ceremony, later in the month, at the Genoa Science Festival.

MEDICINE PRIZE. Dan Ariely of Duke University (USA), Rebecca L. Waber of MIT (USA), Baba Shiv of Stanford University (USA), and Ziv Carmon of INSEAD (Singapore) for demonstrating that high-priced fake medicine is more effective than low-priced fake medicine..

PHYSICS PRIZE. Dorian Raymer of the Ocean Observatories Initiative at Scripps Institution of Oceanography, USA, and Douglas Smith of the University of California, San Diego, USA, for proving mathematically that heaps of string or hair or almost anything else will inevitably tangle themselves up in knots.

CHEMISTRY PRIZE. Sharee A. Umpierre of the University of Puerto Rico, Joseph A. Hill of The Fertility Centers of New England (USA), Deborah J. Anderson of Boston University School of Medicine and Harvard Medical School (USA), for discovering that Coca-Cola is an effective spermicide, and to Chuang-Ye Hong of Taipei Medical University (Taiwan), C.C. Shieh, P. Wu, and B.N. Chiang (all of Taiwan) for discovering that it is not.

At the 2007 ceremony, Ig Nobel Medicine Prize winner Dan Meyer punctuates his and Brian Witcombe's joint one-minute-long acceptance speech. Meyer and Dr. Witcombe (who is not visible in this photo, having stepped back to give his colleague breathing room) were honored for studying the medical side-effects of sword-swallowing. Nobel Laureates William Lipscomb, Robert Laughlin and Dudley Herschbach can be seen here analyzing Mr. Meyer's speech. Photo Credit: Alexey Eliseev.

BIOLOGY PRIZE: Prof. Dr. Johanna E.M.H. van Bronswijk of Eindhoven University of Technology, The Netherlands, for doing a census of all the mites, insects, spiders, pseudoscorpions, crustaceans, bacteria, algae, ferns and fungi with whom we share our beds each night.

WHO ATTENDED THE CEREMONY: Mayu Yamamoto PRESS NOTE: Toscanini's Ice Cream, the finest ice cream shop in Cambridge, Massachusetts, created a new ice cream flavor in honor of Mayu Yamamoto, and introduced it at the Ig Nobel ceremony. The flavor is called "Yum-a-Moto Vanilla Twist."

LINGUISTICS PRIZE: Juan Manuel Toro, Josep B. Trobalon and Núria Sebastián-Gallés, of Universitat de Barcelona, for showing that rats sometimes cannot tell the difference between a person speaking Japanese backwards and a person speaking Dutch backwards.

WHO ATTENDED THE CEREMONY: The winners could not travel to the ceremony, so they instead delivered their acceptance speech via recorded video

LITERATURE PRIZE: Glenda Browne of Blaxland, Blue Mountains, Australia, for her study of the word "the" -- and of the many ways it causes problems for anyone who tries to put things into alphabetical order.

PEACE PRIZE: The Air Force Wright Laboratory, Dayton, Ohio, USA, for instigating research & development on a chemical weapon -- the so-called "gay bomb" -- that will make enemy soldiers become sexually irresistible to each other.

ECONOMICS PRIZE: Kuo Cheng Hsieh, of Taichung, Taiwan, for patenting a device, in the year 2001, that catches bank robbers by dropping a net over them.

REFERENCE: U.S. patent #6,219,959, granted on April 24, 2001, for a "net trapping system for capturing a robber immediately." NOTE: The Ig Nobel Board of Governors attempted repeatedly to find Mr. Hsieh, but he seemed to have vanished mysteriously. Some days after the ceremony came news that he is alive and well.

ORNITHOLOGY: Ivan R. Schwab, of the University of California Davis, and the late Philip R.A. May of the University of California Los Angeles, for exploring and explaining why woodpeckers don't get headaches.

WHO ATTENDED THE IG NOBEL PRIZE CEREMONY: Howard Stapleton planned to attend, but his plans were interrupted by a family medical situation.

ACOUSTICS: D. Lynn Halpern (of Harvard Vanguard Medical Associates, and Brandeis University, and Northwestern University), Randolph Blake (of Vanderbilt University and Northwestern University) and James Hillenbrand (of Western Michigan University and Northwestern University) for conducting experiments to learn why people dislike the sound of fingernails scraping on a blackboard.

REFERENCE: "The Significance of Mr. Richard Buckley's Exploding Trousers: Reflections on an Aspect of Technological Change in New Zealand Dairy-Farming between the World Wars," James Watson, Agricultural History, vol. 78, no. 3, Summer 2004, pp. 346-60.

WHO ATTENDED THE IG NOBEL CEREMONY: James Watson

PHYSICS: John Mainstone and the late Thomas Parnell of the University of Queensland, Australia, for patiently conducting an experiment that began in the year 1927 -- in which a glob of congealed black tar has been slowly, slowly dripping through a funnel, at a rate of approximately one drop every nine years.

WHO ATTENDED THE IG NOBEL CEREMONY: The winner was unable to travel, and delivered his acceptance speech via video.

LITERATURE: The Internet entrepreneurs of Nigeria, for creating and then using e-mail to distribute a bold series of short stories, thus introducing millions of readers to a cast of rich characters -- General Sani Abacha, Mrs. Mariam Sanni Abacha, Barrister Jon A Mbeki Esq., and others -- each of whom requires just a small amount of expense money so as to obtain access to the great wealth to which they are entitled and which they would like to share with the kind person who assists them.

BIOLOGY: Benjamin Smith of the University of Adelaide, Australia and the University of Toronto, Canada and the Firmenich perfume company, Geneva, Switzerland, and ChemComm Enterprises, Archamps, France; Craig Williams of James Cook University and the University of South Australia; Michael Tyler of the University of Adelaide; Brian Williams of the University of Adelaide; and Yoji Hayasaka of the Australian Wine Research Institute; for painstakingly smelling and cataloging the peculiar odors produced by 131 different species of frogs when the frogs were feeling stressed.

PSYCHOLOGY: Daniel Simons of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and Christopher Chabris of Harvard University, for demonstrating that when people pay close attention to something, it's all too easy to overlook anything else -- even a woman in a gorilla suit.

ENGINEERING: The late John Paul Stapp, the late Edward A. Murphy, Jr., and George Nichols, for jointly giving birth in 1949 to Murphy's Law, the basic engineering principle that "If there are two or more ways to do something, and one of those ways can result in a catastrophe, someone will do it "(or, in other words: "If anything can go wrong, it will").

LITERATURE: John Trinkaus, of the Zicklin School of Business, New York City, for meticulously collecting data and publishing more than 80 detailed academic reports about things that annoyed him (such as: What percentage of young people wear baseball caps with the peak facing to the rear rather than to the front; What percentage of pedestrians wear sport shoes that are white rather than some other color; What percentage of swimmers swim laps in the shallow end of a pool rather than the deep end; What percentage of automobile drivers almost, but not completely, come to a stop at one particular stop-sign; What percentage of commuters carry attaché cases; What percentage of shoppers exceed the number of items permitted in a supermarket's express checkout lane; and What percentage of students dislike the taste of Brussels sprouts.)

BIOLOGY: Buck Weimer of Pueblo, Colorado for inventing Under-Ease, airtight underwear with a replaceable charcoal filter that removes bad-smelling gases before they escape.

ECONOMICS: Joel Slemrod, of the University of Michigan Business School, and Wojciech Kopczuk, of University of British Columbia [and who has since moved to Columbia University], for their conclusion that people find a way to postpone their deaths if that would qualify them for a lower rate on the inheritance tax.

TECHNOLOGY: Awarded jointly to John Keogh of Hawthorn, Victoria, Australia, for patenting the wheel in the year 2001, and to the Australian Patent Office for granting him Innovation Patent #2001100012. [NOTE: Several years after this prize was awarded, the patent office quietly revoked Mr. Keogh's patent.]

ECONOMICS: The Reverend Sun
Myung Moon, for bringing efficiency and steady growth to the mass-marriage industry,
with, according to his reports, a 36-couple wedding in 1960,
a 430-couple wedding in 1968, an 1800-couple wedding in 1975, a 6000-couple wedding in 1982, a 30,000-couple
wedding in 1992, a 360,000-couple wedding in 1995,
and a 36,000,000-couple wedding in 1997.

MANAGED HEALTH CARE: The late George and Charlotte Blonsky of New York City and San Jose, California, for inventing
a device (US Patent #3,216,423) to aid women in giving birth — the woman is
strapped onto a circular table, and the table is then rotated at high speed.

CHEMISTRY: Jacques Benveniste of France, for his homeopathic discovery that not only does water have memory, but that the information can be transmitted over telephone lines and the Internet. [NOTE: Benveniste also won the 1991 Ig Nobel Chemistry Prize.]

SCIENCE EDUCATION: Dolores Krieger, Professor Emerita, New York University, for demonstrating the merits of therapeutic touch, a method by which nurses manipulate the energy fields of ailing patients by carefully avoiding physical contact with those patients.

PHYSICS. Deepak Chopra of The Chopra Center for Well Being, La Jolla, California, for his unique interpretation of quantum physics as it applies to life, liberty, and the pursuit of economic happiness.

ECONOMICS. Richard Seed of Chicago for his efforts to stoke up the world economy by cloning himself and other human beings.

MEDICINE: To Patient Y and to his doctors, Caroline Mills, Meirion Llewelyn, David Kelly, and Peter Holt, of Royal Gwent Hospital, in Newport, Wales, for the cautionary medical report, "A Man Who Pricked His Finger and Smelled Putrid for 5 Years." [Published in "TheLancet," vol. 348, November 9, 1996, p. 1282.]

MEDICINE: James Johnston of R.J. Reynolds, Joseph Taddeo of U.S. Tobacco, Andrew Tisch of Lorillard, William Campbell of Philip Morris, Edward A. Horrigan of Liggett Group, Donald S. Johnston of American Tobacco Company, and the late Thomas E. Sandefur, Jr., chairman of Brown and Williamson Tobacco Co. for their unshakable discovery, as testified to the U.S. Congress, that nicotine is not addictive.

BIODIVERSITY: Chonosuke Okamura of the Okamura Fossil Laboratory in Nagoya, Japan, for discovering the fossils of dinosaurs, horses, dragons, princesses, and more than 1000 other extinct "mini-species," each of which is less than 1/100 of an inch in length.

NUTRITION: John
Martinez of J. Martinez & Company in Atlanta, Georgia, for educating the world about LuakCoffee, the world's most expensive coffee, which is made from coffee beans ingested and excreted by the luak (aka, the palm civet), a bobcat-like animal native to Indonesia.

LITERATURE: David B. Busch and James R. Starling,
of Madison Wisconsin, for their deeply penetrating research report, "Rectal
foreign bodies: Case Reports and a Comprehensive Review of the World's Literature." The citations include reports of, among
other items: seven light bulbs; a knife sharpener; two flashlights; a wire spring; a snuff box; an oil can with potato stopper;
eleven different forms of fruits, vegetables and other foodstuffs; a jeweler's saw; a frozen pig's tail; a tin cup; a beer glass; and
one patient's remarkable ensemble collection consisting of spectacles, a suitcase key, a tobacco pouch and a magazine.

MEDICINE: This prize is awarded in two parts. First, to Patient X, formerly of the US Marine Corps, valiant
victim of a venomous bite from his pet rattlesnake, for his determined use of electroshock therapy -- at his own insistence,
automobile sparkplug wires were attached to his lip, and the car engine revved to 3000 rpm for five minutes. Second, to
Dr. Richard C. Dart of the Rocky Mountain Poison Center
and Dr. Richard A. Gustafson of The University of Arizona Health Sciences Center, for their well-grounded medical report:
"Failure of Electric Shock Treatment for Rattlesnake Envenomation."
[Published in Annals of Emergency Medicine, vol. 20, no. 6, June 1991, pp. 659-61.]

LITERATURE: L. Ron Hubbard, ardent author of science fiction and founding father of Scientology, for his crackling
Good Book, "Dianetics,"
which is highly profitable to mankind or to a portion thereof.

CHEMISTRY: Texas State Senator Bob Glasgow, wise writer of logical
legislation, for sponsoring the 1989 drug control law which make it illegal to purchase beakers, flasks, test tubes, or other
laboratory glassware without a permit.

ECONOMICS: Jan Pablo Davila of Chile, tireless
trader of financial futures and former employee of the state-owned Codelco Company, for
instructing his computer to "buy" when he meant "sell," and subsequently attempting to recoup his losses by making increasingly
unprofitable trades that ultimately lost .5 percent of Chile's gross national product. Davila's relentless achievement inspired\
his countrymen to coin a new verb: " davilar," meaning, "to botch things up royally."

VISIONARY TECHNOLOGY: Presented jointly to Jay Schiffman of Farmington Hills, Michigan, crack inventor of AutoVision, an image projection device that makes it possible to drive a car and watch television at the same time, and to the Michigan state legislature, for making it legal to do so. REFERENCE: US patent #5061996A.

CHEMISTRY: James Campbell and Gaines Campbell of Lookout Mountain, Tennessee, dedicated deliverers of fragrance, for inventing scent strips, the odious method by which perfume is applied to magazine pages.

LITERATURE: Eric Topol, R. Califf, F. Van de Werf, P. W. Armstrong, and their 972 co-authors, for publishing a medical research paper which has one hundred times as many authors as pages. [The study was published in The New England Journal of Medicine, vol. 329, no. 10, September 2, 1993, pp. 673-82. The authors are from the following countries: Australia, Belgium, Canada, France, Germany, Ireland, Israel, Luxembourg, The Netherlands, New Zealand, Poland, Spain, Switzerland, United Kingdom, United States.] [Click here for additional details.]

The 1992 Ig Nobel Prize Winners

MEDICINE: F. Kanda, E. Yagi, M. Fukuda, K. Nakajima, T. Ohta and O. Nakata of the Shisedo Research Center in Yokohama, for their pioneering research study "Elucidation of Chemical Compounds Responsible for Foot Malodour," especially for their conclusion that people who think they have foot odor do, and those who don't, don't. [Published in British Journal of Dermatology, vol. 122, no. 6,June 1990, pp. 771-6.]

NUTRITION: The utilizers of Spam, courageous consumers of canned comestibles, for 54 years of undiscriminating digestion.

LITERATURE: Yuri Struchkov, unstoppable author
from the Institute of Organoelemental Compounds in Moscow, for the 948 scientific papers he is credited with publishing between the
years 1981 and 1990, averaging more than one every 3.9 days.

The 1991 Ig Nobel Prize Winners

CHEMISTRY: Jacques Benveniste, prolific proseletizer
and dedicated correspondent of "Nature," for his persistent discovery that water,
H2O, is an intelligent liquid, and for
demonstrating to his satisfaction that water is able to remember events long after all trace of those events has vanished.

PEACE: Edward Teller,
father of the hydrogen bomb and first champion of the Star Wars weapons system, for his lifelong efforts to change the meaning of peace
as we know it.

Did They Really Do These Things?

Are these things real? Yes, indeed. You can look it up. That's why we give you
the references.

The only exceptions came in 1991, the very first year of the ceremony, and 1994. In 1991,
three additional Prizes were given for apocryphal achievements. In 1994, one prize was based on what turned out to be erroneous
press accounts. Those four apocryphal achievements are not included in the list on this page. ALL the other Prizes, in all
years, were awarded for genuine achievements.

For extensive background info and additional reference for many of the past
winners, see the books Marc Abrahams has written about Ig Nobel Prizes.